Image Sensors World

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Germany-based machine vision and industrial camera maker Basler stock market value more than triples since the beginning of 2017. The company earning reports reveal a surge in its imaging business:

10-05-17
"The strong demand is mainly due to high investments in the electronics industry in Asia along with a widely spread upswing in the market. Furthermore, bottle necks in materials and production led to increasing delivery times and these to early order placements."

09-08-17
"In a very dynamic market environment, Basler AG closed the first half-year of 2017 with new record values in incoming orders and sales. For the first six months of 2017, the VDMA (Verband Deutscher Maschinen- und Anlagenbau, German engineering association) reported the strongest growth for image processing components since 15 years. For German manufacturers of image processing components this meant an order growth by 47 % and a sales growth by 43 % - in the same period Basler's incoming orders grew by 100 % and sales by 62 %.”

The camera uses a quadlinear CMOS sensor with nanowire micro-polarizer filters. It captures multiple native polarization state data without any interpolation. With a maximum line rate of 70 kHz, the camera outputs independent images of 0°(s), 90° (p), and 135° polarization states as well as an unfiltered channel.

“Polarization brings vision technology to the next level for many industrial applications. It detects material properties such as birefringence, stress, film, composition, and grading etc. that are not detectable using conventional imaging,” said Xing-Fei He, Senior Product Manager.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

"The FLIR Boson camera core occupies only 4.9cm3 without its lens, including a 320×256 pixel microbolometer and an advanced processor. The system is made very compact and easy for integrators to handle. It includes a new chalcogenide glass for the lens and a powerful Vision Processing Unit for the first time.

The thermal camera uses 12µm pixels based on a vanadium oxide technology microbolometer, the ISC1406L, which features a 320×256 resolution and wafer-level packaging (WLP) to achieve a very compact design. The die is half the size of the one in the oldest ISC0901 model, but gives the same definition."

Saturday, September 23, 2017

"...have a look at a clock with a ticking hand. As a human, you see the clock ticking at a particular speed. But for a turtle it would appear to be ticking at twice that speed. For most fly species, each tick would drag by about four times more slowly. In effect, the speed of time differs depending on your species.
This happens because animals see the world around them like a continuous video. But in reality, they piece together images sent from the eyes to the brain in distinct flashes a set number of times per second. Humans average 60 flashes per second, turtles 15, and flies 250."

SlashGear: Intel work on Project Alloy "Merged Reality" headset featuring RealSense 3D camera has been stopped. In a statement to RoadToVR Intel says:

"Intel has made the decision to wind down its Project Alloy reference design, however we will continue to invest in the development of technologies to power next-generation AR/VR experiences. This includes: Movidius for visual processing, Intel RealSense depth sensing and six degrees of freedom (6DoF) solutions, and other enabling technologies..."

We do note a new Phase Pixel pattern, but the big news is the absence of surface artifacts corresponding to the through silicon via (TSV) arrays we’ve seen for a few years. A superficial review of the die photo would suggest it’s a regular back-illuminated (BSI) chip. However, we’ve confirmed it’s a stacked (Exmor RS) chip which means hybrid bonding is in use for the first time in an Apple camera!"

Friday, September 22, 2017

It came to my attention that a number of Japanese camera companies started selling cameras with SiOnyx Black Silicon sensors. One of these companies is Bitran with CS-64NIR cooled camera based on XQE-0920 sensor. The company publishes a presentation with the application examples for the new camera sensitive up to 1200nm.